VMware Weekly News Recap: November 8

VMware News

***Don’t miss our live Google Hangout on Nov. 12 at 10 a.m. PST to talk about the future of IT with futurologist Paul Saffo, along with a number of influential industry analysts and journalists.***

In VMware news, the network virtualization team attended the OpenStack Summit in Hong Kong this week, where they announced advancement of our support for the OpenStack framework, expansion of our scope of contributions to include Compute, Networking and Storage and the delivery of OpenStack Neutron support for VMware NSX network virtualization.

Industry News

In Industry news, InformationWeek’s Charles Babcock reports on VMware’s announcement to partner with Mirantis to help customers build OpenStack private clouds on top of their vSphere virtualized servers. Boris Renski, executive VP and co-founder of Mirantis, calls the VMware deal “a strategic partnership” that illustrates how both Mirantis and VMware “are trying to uphold customer choice.”

ITWorld.com’s Nancy Gohring also reports on VMware’s announcement to partner with OpenStack. Gohring writes, “Mirantis says that VMware has now demonstrated its commitment to the community with its significant code contributions to OpenStack… Given that so many enterprises are VMware shops, it benefits Mirantis to have its OpenStack distribution run nicely in VMware environment.”

In other networking news, Alex Barrett of SearchServerVirtualization writes an in-depth piece on the nitty-gritty of VMware NSX. “With server virtualization, VMware revolutionized how organizations deliver compute services. Now, [VMware] says it can do the same thing to networking with VMware NSX.” Barrett goes on to answer three important questions that customers might have about NSX.

Forbes’ Ben Kepes highlights recent conversations with executives from Microsoft and VMware that discussed both companies’ plans to become “cloud powerhouses.” In the article “In The Face Of Armageddon, Microsoft and VMware Get A New Religion,” Kepes writes: “Despite an arguably slow start, [Microsoft and VMware are] both pushing hard against the AWS hegemony. There’s a need for both of them to move further away from the FUD and more into real world benefits their platforms can bring." Kepes notes, “both companies are innovating and delivering real value to customers and that gives them an odd-on chance of surviving the tectonic shifts to come.”

The VAR Guy’s Elliot Markowitz reports on a recent Cisco study that indicates virtualization’s room for growth, although new statistics show that the technology is currently making significant inroads within SMBs. Markowitz muses that every year seems to be the year of virtualization, with industry pundits predicting that most organizations will finally adopt server, PC, operating systems or application virtualization in a major way. Citing the study, Markowitz declares, “Well, it’s safe to say we finally crossed the chasm… 77 percent of all respondents said they already have some sort of virtualization technology in place. Even further, 71 percent of these said they expect to allocate more budgeted dollars for virtualization to the tune of 20 percent.”

InfoWorld’s Eric Knorr discusses nine predictable trends for 2014 and beyond. He writes, “We’re at one of those rare junctures when a bunch of trends have begun to crystallize – and I’m pretty sure many of them will persist for more than 12 months.” The nine predictions span a range of technologies, with “Cloud is the new hardware” taking the number one spot.

Lastly, Farah Mohamed of Huffington Post reports that as revelations about the National Security Agency's secret surveillance continue to trickle out, cloud companies are feeling the fallout. Mohamed writes, “[Public cloud company] growth is threatened by revelations like one in a recent Washington Post article, that the NSA has been tapping into the cloud company databases of Google and Yahoo. When users' data is stored far away from them in the cloud, privacy is paramount -- and stories about threats to that privacy could hurt cloud companies' bottom line.” She goes on to talk about how some big technology companies are reacting to the new information.

Stay tuned for our Weekly News Recap next Friday and be sure to follow @VMwareNews and subscribe to the VMware Company Blog to stay up to date with all VMware news and announcements throughout the week.

About Morgan OLeary

Morgan is a digital media specialist and public relations professional who has led VMware’s corporate social media and blog efforts for the last year. Combined with her global PR experience for a number of companies across industries, Morgan has developed an eye for story and an appreciation for rich media content that will serve Tribal Knowledge audiences well.